Health informatics

An eight to ten page APA final paper evaluating a single clinical decision support system chosen from AAPHelp, MYCIN, DxPlain, ABEL, GermWatcher and ISABEL, across design, privacy and security, interoperability, internet technologies and data integrity, and closing with a written compliance policy for that system.

A two-page paper on the Farmington Endoscopy Center case: propose at least two additional CDSS data elements with rationale for each, and develop a model for reducing the center's procedure cancellation rate.

A HIM 515 Topic 2 discussion post comparing the certification requirements of the areas covered in the lecture, explaining how they differ by discipline, and taking a supported position on whether a generalised health care informatics certification would be feasible.

A HIM 515 discussion post considering the feasibility of a single provider in a rural setting implementing an electronic medical record in their office, and identifying the challenges and the benefits that implementation would bring.

The deliverable is a short list of questions, and the constraint the prompt spends most of its words on is that the list must be short — which means each question has to earn its place.

The scan comes first and the organisation is positioned against it — and the settings the brief lists are named because their IT maturity is not the same.

Interoperability is a degree, not a yes or no — and a hospital can hold dozens of interfaces while having almost none of it.

In a 12-15 slide presentation with detailed speaker notes or a paper of at least 800 words, develop a health information technology strategic plan for your own organisation covering corporate goals, HIT goals, applications portfolio priorities, architecture and infrastructure, software development, management and staffing, and resource requirements.

The prompt has two halves and the second one carries the marks: not just which technologies your organisation uses to collect data, but how that data actually *directs* patient care and outcomes — a causal claim, not an inventory.

Build the spreadsheet before the summary — and remember that doing nothing has a cost too, or the proposal is being compared against a free alternative that does not exist.

High-level licenses you to skip the server specs, not the sequence — and a plan that would fit any hospital unedited is a methodology, not a plan.

The second half asks about large versus small organisations specifically, which most posts answer as though size were irrelevant. Capital, bargaining power and standardisation all scale — and so do the costs.

Describe how information technology and data mining affect healthcare quality, then use two quality performance indicators to compare and contrast concrete examples of how technology and data have changed patient care outcomes.

Differentiate electronic medical records from electronic health records and discuss why interoperability matters to both, and how each improves the quality of and access to care.

Pick one benefit or one challenge and follow it all the way through to both audiences. Covering four in a short post is the most common way to score badly here.

The assignment is an evaluation of the EMR in front of you, against a published list of pediatric-specific functionalities. The interesting finding is usually what your system does not do.

The second half is the harder one: naming where your own organisation is weak. A post that finds only strengths has answered half the question and the easier half.

Interview subjects will tell you which report they want, not which decision they are trying to make — and the second is the one that determines the data need.